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eHajj
eGovernment Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain
Bahrain

The Problem

The situation before the initiative involved a manually driven process whereby the travel agent had to approach the ministry for all required approvals. The large number of approvals caused an overload to the ministry and hence, a delay in approval process.
The detailed steps involved:
1. The Travel agent approaches the ministry for submitting the application for obtaining a hajj travel agent licence with all the required documents. The Travel agent has to also visit the ministry for periodic renewal of their licence.
2. On obtaining a valid travel agent licence, the travel agent can register the pilgrims for Hajj based on the time periods set for Hajj registration.
3. The Travel agent will get the contract approved by the ministry to confirm the approval of the pilgrim to go for hajj.
4. After the confirmation is received the travel agent will insure the pilgrim and the work-staff going for hajj.
5. The travel agent registers the vehicles that are going to take the pilgrims to Hajj (by air or land).
6. Once all the formalities are over the travel agent will make the payment on behalf of the pilgrims to conclude the registration process.

Apart from the steps above the complex process of approval happens for more than 15,000 applications every year depending upon the hajj quota allowed for the Kingdom of Bahrain. An each application takes an average of 4 business days for review and approval. If there are clarifications it will go for a longer period.

Solution and Key Benefits

 What is the initiative about? (the solution)
All the below mentioned services were provided online through the national portal of the Kingdom of Bahrain. The main benefits of the services are:
The travel agent registration and renewal of registration system becomes more efficient allowing the ministry to keep track of the entire process. In addition, there is a great ease in completing the hajj pilgrimage formalities in a very short turnaround time. The Services considerably reduce the time taken for approvals and verification of the different applications for the hajj pilgrimage by the ministry. Online status of all the applications submitted by the travel agent gives the right information at the right time while the application provides the flexibility to have a single repository for all pilgrim information. The business rules embedded in the system will ensure the sequential flow of the application from application process to verification and the final approval thereby helping the ministry administration and travel agent to reduce the number of discrepancies during the final stages. The Ministry will also be able to provide the public with up-to-date and accurate information.

The processing time of the application came down to 1 day average if the application is satisfying the requirements.

The main business measures are:
1) Turnaround time for the approval of an application. 2) The reduction in the delays with the number of visits to the ministry for application. 3) The reduction in the number of missing information requests.

Actors and Stakeholders

 Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The eGovernment Authority (eGA) in Kingdom of Bahrain has proposed the solution and started implementing it in March 2010. The solution was developed completely in-house by eGA with the assistance of MOIA being the business owner. The new automated process has multiple stakeholders as follows:
Stakeholder: Ministry of Islamic Affairs (MOIA)
Main Contributors: Head of Hajj & Umrah Department in Ministry of Islamic affairs, Head of IT, IT Technical Staff, Hajj & Umrah office staff.
Role: Primary owner of the service, providing the business requirements, development support with backend connections, updating of data, processing of all the service requests (certifications / applications) etc.

Stakeholder: Ministry of Health (MOH)
Main Contributors: Hajj & Umrah Mission, Licensure Registration Office, Head of Health Centers, IT Director, IT Technical Team.
Role: Authorize the medical team (doctors, nurses and paramedic staff) to accompany the travel agents during the Hajj pilgrimage. It is also responsible for performing the medical check-up for the work team (Cook, cleaners, administrators) and pilgrims. The Hajj mission team conducts workshops for the work team to inform them about the safety and security guidelines to be followed during the Hajj pilgrimage.

Stakeholder: General Traffic Directorate (GDT)
Main Contributors: Vehicle Inspection Chief and IT Technical Team.
Role: Responsible for providing the vehicle registration details for those vehicles which need to pass the border and travel for Hajj

Stakeholder: Central Informatics Organization (CIO)
Main Contributors: Head of Development and IT Technical Team.
Role: Responsible for managing and maintaining the GDT application and developing interfaces for sharing the vehicle inspection validity details for the vehicles used to transfer pilgrims and working team.

Stakeholder: eGovernment Authority
Main Contributors: Director of Service delivery, Assistant Director of Service Delivery, BPR Team, Development Team, Testing Team and Quality Assurance Team.
Role: Conduct as-is study of the Hajj pilgrimage, Travel Agent registration, Renewal of Licenses processes, and Registration of Medical Staff; Recommend to-be process with appropriate process reengineering; Design and develop the back-end and portal front-end applications; Integrating with the MOIA, CIO and MOH databases; Testing and Deploying the solution; Undertake Training to the MOIA users; Training the Travel Agents on the front-end application; Conducting Marketing and Awareness of the services to the public.

(a) Strategies

 Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
 a.      What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
eGovernment Authority has developed its own strategies for solution development, which are based on the principles of better eGovernance such as usability, transparency, availability, scalability, accessibility, security, confidentiality, integrity etc.

Governed by the Bahrain eGovernment Strategy and guided by the Economic Vision, the initiative was to provide a state-of-art application to the pilgrims visiting Hajj from the Kingdom of Bahrain. The initiative is a first of its kind in the whole GCC and Arab World. The main objectives of the initiative are:

1) Structure vision of the service plan: eGovernment has a well configured service portfolio that caters the demands of all the ministries and authorities in the kingdom. The portfolio concentrates on providing the citizen with the right services that can make their life easy.

2) Joining hands with the Core ministries: During the creation of the service the ministries were involved in aligning their objectives to enable the smooth development rollout of the service.

3) Citizen centric service design: The solution design was considered based on the requirements from end users like the lawyers, the judged, the citizens etc. This helped in creating user friendly solutions addressing the needs of the stakeholders. For e.g. all applications were provided online, SMS based status were provided, online payments were enabled, and appointment based court visits were instituted for physical transactions.

(b) Implementation

 b.      What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
The eGovernment Authority (eGA) is following a framework to manage and develop the services/projects. This framework is based on the Project Management Institute (PMI) and System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) fundamentals and practices which prescribes a defined systematic process of the planning, directing, monitoring, adjusting and controlling a series of interrelated tasks.

The System Development Cycle (SDLC) will consist of the following phases:

1. Conceptualization Phase:

The conceptualization phase has a goal to establish the project environment and to develop and maintain an appropriate work plan that will be used as the basis for assigning, monitoring and controlling all of the work required to deliver the solution to the specific requirements.

2. Analysis and Design Phase:

The analysis and design phase has two main goals:
• Develop detailed business requirements and logical understanding by assessing the current situation.
• Ensure that a design for the defined requirements is developed, documented and verified to form the basis for producing the necessary system components.

3. Production and Implementation Phase:

The production and implementation phase has three major goals:
• Transform the designs into complete components that meet the requirements, as well as integrate and test the completed components to ensure suitability and usability.
• Package the application or release for delivery, perform formal acceptance testing and gain final approval for implementation.
• Install all components of the application in the production environment, test the installed application, train all users and support personnel.
•
4. Operation and Change Management Phase:

In case of any changes, the eGA change control procedure will be triggered. The phase will continue until stabilization of the service. The team ensures a smooth transition of the service from the development environment to the production environment.

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

 c.      What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
Major Obstacle: No documented procedures were available for executing the application reception/review and approval at MOIA’s end. This led to confusion in the system level process definition.

Methodology for overcoming: An As-Is and To-Be study was done on the business layer during the initial phase of the project to document the process. This gave the opportunity to the ministry to brain storm as a team and come up with a clear definition of the different logical processes to be followed.


Major Obstacle: Lack of infrastructure for accommodating the project.

Methodology for overcoming: A plan was created to bundle the requirements of the project and it was shared to the business owner for the successful rollout of the service.


Major Obstacle: Absence of interface between the ministries to share the data.

Methodology for overcoming: All impacted stakeholders for the service were included during the initial study to identify the interface requirements and to address the requirements during the development phase.

Major Obstacle: Involving the Travel agent to start using the service and to make them accustomed with the service.

Methodology for overcoming: There were a series of workshops and marketing activities conducted to make the travel agent aware of the system and to get their buy in to use the capabilities of the system.


Major Obstacle: Lack of technical expertise in maintaining the service at the business user end.

Methodology for overcoming: A support team was constituted to carry out the post implementation activities at the ministry premises for a period of one year.

(d) Use of Resources

 d.      What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
Resources Involved
Role: Executive Sponsor
Responsibility:
• Has ultimate authority over and responsibility for the project
• Approves changes to the scope
• Evaluates and approves project deliverables

Role: Project Sponsor
Responsibility:
• Acts as champion of the project
• Is accountable for the delivery of planned benefits associated with the project
• Ensures resolution of issues escalated by the Project Manager
• Sponsors the communications programme; communicates the programme’s goals to the organization as a whole.
• Makes key organisation/commercial decisions for the project
• Assures availability of essential project resources
• Makes the business decisions for the project
• Approves work products

Role: Programme Manager
Responsibility:
• Overall management and co-ordination of the program of the service
• Contributing to strategy, policy and procedure
• Management of supplier/contractual relationships
• Budgetary control of the program of projects.
• Monitoring of, and responding to, issues at the program level

Role: Project Manager
Responsibility:
• Controls the day to day aspects of the service
• Performs project management processes (structure, plan, control, assess, report, conclude)
• Develops Project Charter and Project Plans
• Executes formal reviews and management reviews
• Tracks and disposes of issues
• Tracks action items and budgets

Role: System Analyst
Responsibility:
• Assesses current systems
• Develops and maintains models of business requirements
• Designs and organises procedures

Role: Developer
Responsibility:
• Working with the Project Manager on definition of development requirements and priorities.
• Data Migration.
• Interfaces with other systems.
• Reporting configuration and deployment.
• Set up and maintenance of security rights and access permissions.
• Contributing to technical strategy, policy and procedure.
• Development and operation of technical testing program.
• Production of technical documentation to agreed quality standards.
• Reporting on progress/issues to management and users.

Role: Testing & QA
Responsibility:
• Approves the quality management approach and plan
• Acts as a quality reviewer throughout the service
• Reviews and confirms major work products for the service
• Ensures the quality of the process

Cost

Human Resource for 10 months each developer : BD 220,596.000
Hardware cost (2 servers, application and DB) – Estimated cost : BD 150,000
Software cost (1 yr Oracle License + 1yr AM) – Estimated cost : BD 30,000
Total Amount – Estimate cost : BD 400,596

Resource Mobilization

Technical resource for developing the service was mobilized from eGA and the MOIA.
Hardware and software resources were also procured by a closed tender process.

Sustainability and Transferability

  Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
The Hajj process is having lot of standard policies and procedures that can be reused across the countries especially in the Middle East. The solution that has been defined is made in a state-of-the-art process to ensure reusability and sustainability. The Modules are framed to help the user get information and complies to international portal standards.

Lessons Learned

 What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The Main Impacts are:
1. Ease of access to information for the pilgrims and Travel agents.
2. Flexibility in handling things by ministry to support the Hajj mission.
3. Enthusiasm of the ministry and the users to approach the service and complete activities on time.
4. Better track of the application and the status of the application.
5. Easy payment methods reduce the complexity of spending time at Banks for doing payments.
6. The turnaround time of the whole process was reduced by 50% to 60%.
7. Quality of the services provided to the pilgrims has improved.
Key Lessons learned:
1. Creating a tailored application according to the business requirement is better than changing the business based on a preconfigured tool.
2. The automation process should not be a sudden change in the environment, but has to be taken up through a series of exercise to make the users and impacted stakeholders comfortable with the changes.
3. A massive initiative like this needs a well configured project environment with clearly defined ‘RACI structure‘ for ensuring success.
4. The driver for the initiatives involving multiple stakeholders should have a governing committee to reduce the decision delays and show stoppers.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   eGovernment Authority, Kingdom of Bahrain
Institution Type:   Government Agency  
Contact Person:   Heyam Ebrahim Hazeem
Title:   Asst. Director, Services and Channel  
Telephone/ Fax:   +973 17388303
Institution's / Project's Website:   +973 17388338
E-mail:   hhazeem@ega.gov.bh  
Address:   Building no. 145, Road no. 2403, Block no. 224
Postal Code:   PO Box 75533
City:  
State/Province:   Muharraq
Country:   Bahrain

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